Key Takeaways

• The evidence that animal welfare dominates in neartermism is strong.
• Open Philanthropy (OP) should scale up its animal welfare allocation over several years to approach a majority of OP's neartermist grantmaking.
• If OP disagrees, they should practice reasoning transparency by clarifying their views:
  • How much weight does OP's theory of welfare place on pleasure and pain, as opposed to nonhedonic goods?
  • Precisely how much more does OP value one unit of a human's welfare than one unit of another animal's welfare, just because the former is a human? How does OP derive this tradeoff?
  • How would OP's views have to change for OP to prioritize animal welfare in neartermism?

Summary

• Rethink Priorities (RP)'s moral weight research endorses the claim that the best animal welfare interventions are orders of magnitude (1000x) more cost-effective than the best neartermist alternatives.